Reconquest Blood and Gold: The Making of Spain with Simon Sebag Montefiore

GUNFIRE

Here, the streets are thick with the smoke of battle.

GUNFIRE

Behind the good-natured, slightly tipsy fervour of a small town

fiesta in Spain, you can smell the delirium, the fever of victory.

These people are re-enacting the long battle between Christendom

and Islam.

This, not the Middle East, over many centuries, was the final

frontier between Christendom and Islam -

the long war.

This is the story of Spain after the fall of its Muslim caliphate.

A 400-year Holy War ended with the power couple who

made modern Spain.

First came anarchy then, from Africa, waves of Islamic invaders

and finally, the traumatic transition into a Christian kingdom -

the explosive birth of Spain.

It's deafening. I'll have to shout till I'm hoarse.

HOARSELY: In the North, half the country was ruled by Spanish

kingdoms like Castile and Aragon,

and in the South, the Emirs fought for power in cities like Seville

and Granada.

It was a time of dog eat dog.

All fought against each other.

It wasn't just about Christian versus Muslim.

It was also a tournament of power, a game of thrones.

As I make my way as historian and traveller,

I'll visit the most beautiful places in Spain

and reveal their secrets...

..Granada and its radiant Alhambra,

the Giralda in Seville,

and I'll find the shocking truth about my own family,

hidden for centuries.

That's unbelievable.

Even before the Crusades had arisen, even after the Crusades had failed,

it was here that Christendom would be re-awakened.

Spain's Renaissance monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella,

would claw the nation together in a blood-soaked embrace.

They've let me in to the vault of Ferdinand and Isabella,

where they're actually buried.

Ferdinand and Isabella's new confidence is expressed

everywhere here.

Here is a huge F for Fernando with a crown over it.

Over there is the Y for Isabella. They left their mark everywhere

because it expressed the new power of the Spanish monarchy.

This bitter victory, consolidated by blood purges of Jews

and Muslims, celebrated by the dispatch of Columbus to the

Americas, would turn a collection of war-torn principalities

and fiefdoms into the first world empire,

the champion of international Christendom.

After three centuries of Muslim domination,

Christendom re-awakened in the 11th century.

The caliphate in the South broke up into rival Muslim states.

Spain was the plaything of hostile warlords.

They would decide

if Spain remained Islamic or joined the rest of Christian Europe.

In 1079, the most famous of these warlords

rode into Seville on his magnificent steed.

He came to collect gold, tribute from the Muslim South.

His name was Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar.

Later, El Cid, as he became known, would be

reinvented as the national hero of Spain.

He was a Christian, of course, but he won almost as many

battles for the Muslims as he did for the Christians,

and he never lost a battle.

And the clue is in his name.

El Cid derives from the Arabic Al-Sayyid - a descendant of Mohammed.

It meant the boss, the commander, the big man

or, as it says up here, El Campeador,

The Champion,

"who, by his virile power of character,

"brought calamity to Islam."

And, I should add, when it took his fancy, to Christendom, too.

El Cid was in his ambitious, cunning prime,

a noble-born knight of Castile,

the largest of the Christian kingdoms emerging in the North.

He came to meet Seville's Muslim Emir, Al-Mutamid,

a very different type -

a poet and a scholar, yet like El Cid, a pragmatic politician.

He made El Cid an offer to join him in battle

against the rival southern Emirate of Granada.

I'm travelling to that battlefield.

How did El Cid's intrigue play out?

I've come to the small town of Cabra.

It used to be famous as the olive oil capital of the world

but now it's best known for its connection with El Cid.

He fought one of his most notorious battles here

and now I'm going to go up there to find the exact site of the battle

among the famous olive groves.

The two armies met around here, halfway between Granada and Seville.

Naturally, El Cid tipped the balance.

Even though there were also fine Christian knights

fighting for Granada at the other side, El Cid showed no mercy.

This is said to be El Cid's sword.

He had two and he gave each of them a nickname.

This one he called the Poker.

Fighting for Seville, El Cid was overreaching himself,

treating captured Castilian nobles with contempt

and even pocketing some of the Muslim gold

paid to his own king.

El Cid's flamboyance and duplicity made him many enemies at court,

including his king, Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile.

The battle was fought right here, above the town of Cabra,

and, of course, El Cid won,

but this time, he'd gone too far. He was summoned to court.

King Alfonso made him kneel in front of everyone

and banished him with the words,

"May God curse Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar!"

Alfonso warned his subjects if anyone gave El Cid shelter,

they would lose all they owned and have their eyes gouged out.

Juan Cobo Avila is a local historian in Cabra

who's investigated the Spanish cult of El Cid.

Why were songs sung of this man?

Why did he become a hero? Was it propaganda?

IN OWN LANGUAGE:

El Cid as often fought for the Muslims as he did for the Christians.

Did you learn about that at school?

IN OWN LANGUAGE:

The reconquest of Spain started a multifaceted war with

Christians and Muslims on both sides.

Christian Spain would choose El Cid as its champion

because there were no true heroes.

And then, only a few years after Cabra, came the ideological shift.

Spain's destiny changed

from a tournament of power played for land

and gold to a war of faith and identity.

King Alfonso, who sent El Cid into exile, was an astute serpentine

player, grown rich on Muslim gold, yet now,

a new plan was taking shape.

He would seize the most iconic city in Spain -

Toledo, once the Christian capital until the Muslim Conquest,

a seat of Islamic scholarship.

Alfonso was a Christian king who dreamed of uniting Spain

and conquering the Islamic South.

He set his sights on Toledo, the old Christian Visigothic capital.

In 1085, he took the city. Christianity was resurgent.

Toledo was a great Muslim city

and it had been for 400 years.

It was full of mosques and Arab schools.

Surprisingly, that suited Alfonso down to the ground.

He was a cosmopolitan monarch in a cosmopolitan time.

Now he declared himself emperor of the two faiths.

He was right at home with Arab culture.

He gloried in opening up Toledo's famed Islamic library.

Its Ancient Greek manuscripts, lost for centuries, now helped illuminate

the dank corners of the dark and ignorant castles of Northern Europe.

Yet while Alfonso grew up in a bifocal Christian Islamic world,

he was now embracing a mission to reconquer

all of Spain for Christendom.

He was in for a big surprise.

He hadn't counted on the formidable Muslim reaction.

This is when the Emirs of Al-Andalus put aside their differences

and appealed to a new, harsh, more powerful Islamic movement.

Their arrival would change everything once again.

They landed here, in Gibraltar, to fight the Christians

and exploit the weakness of Spain's Muslim princes.

The fall of Toledo terrified the Emirs of Al-Andalus.

It was clear that the Emperor King Alfonso was going to roll up

the cities of the Islamic South and conquer them for Christendom.

They had to ask for help and there was only one place they could look -

across these straits to Africa,

where a new fundamentalist sect of puritanical Berbers had

arisen in the Atlas Mountains.

The Almoravids were known as the veiled ones

for not just their women, but their men,

soldiers and commanders alike wore veils covering their entire faces.

Only their eyes were visible. It was their trademark.

For their part, they were happy to come

because they were disgusted by the decadence of the Emirs

of Al-Andalus who were paying tribute to Christians.

In 1086, they raised an army of 15,000

and they set off from Africa in rafts,

towing special boats carrying their elephants and horses.

They arrived in Spain and immediately set to work.

King Alfonso rushed to stop them.

He mustered 2,500 troops, including 1,500 horsemen

and 750 knights.

It wasn't enough.

The Almoravid leader, Yusuf ibn Tashfin,

entitling himself Prince of the Muslims, fielded

an army of Berbers, Africans and Senegalese cavalry on white horses.

He sent a message -

convert to Islam, pay us tribute or fight.

The two sides met at 1086 at Sagrajas near the Portuguese border.

King Alfonso, still vibrant after his victory at Toledo,

was totally routed.

The ground was so soaked with Christian blood that the

Almoravids nicknamed it the slippery field.

And the next day, carts heaped with the heads of the Christian dead

were paraded through the cities of Al-Andalus

to show off and announce the Almoravid victory.

It looked as if

there never would be a Christian reconquest.

The Almoravids didn't just delay it,

they transformed it into a religious war.

With Marrakech as their imperial capital,

the Almoravids toppled the Emirs of Al-Andalus and ruled Spain directly.

Here in Seville, I want to find out what happened to Al-Mutamid,

the city's Muslim Emir,

who only eight years earlier hired El Cid in battle.

It was he who'd invited in the Almoravids

and then they swiftly deposed him.

Hidden, almost forgotten

and lost in the gardens of the Alcazar in Seville is this -

one of the columns of Al-Mutamid, the poet king of Seville.

He so loved these gardens that he writes in poetry

here that, at the end of the world, he'd like to be

resurrected and come back here.

But it wasn't to be. Mutamid retired to Morocco.

But he didn't regret this decision, however much of a pragmatist

he'd been in his dealings with the Christians.

He said, "I'd rather be a camel-driver in Morocco than

"a swineherd in Castile."

The African invaders changed the game in Spain in less than a decade

yet guile and ambition still won out.

Guess who came out of all this, smelling of roses?

Yes, the ultimate warlord, the ultimate opportunist - El Cid.

He managed to conquer his own private kingdom

and he died an independent prince of Valencia.

When he passed away in his bed in 1099, the world

had changed completely.

From that year, the Crusades - Christendom's own Holy War -

had taken Jerusalem in the Middle East.

They massacred 70,000 Muslims when they took the Holy City.

From now on, in Spain and in the Middle East,

the Holy War would be a fight to the death.

Over the next decades, the Almoravids grew soft,

unprepared when more severe extremists arose to destroy them.

A militant sect of Islamic jihadists burst, fully formed,

from the deserts of Morocco.

These Almohads, to everyone's amazement,

not unlike Isis today, carried all before them,

conquering a vast empire from West Africa to Morocco.

Their founder had called himself the Mahdi - the chosen one.

But on his death, his successor declared himself the Caliph.

In 1147, the new Caliph crossed the sea to take what

he called the camel's hump of al-Andalus, the juiciest part.

The Almohads, who made Seville their capital,

proclaimed the beginning of a new order.

Their outrages were fanatical, intolerant and spectacular.

They favoured ostentatious atrocities.

They burned Jews and Christians alive

in their synagogues and churches.

They ruled from fortified towers, like this one, the Torre Del Oro.

There were once towers on both sides of the river...

..and a mighty chain was stretched between the two

to control and defend Seville.

I'm meeting Maribel Fierro, an expert on the Almohads,

to learn more about these fearsome religious fighters.

Maribel, who exactly were the Almohads?

How did they define themselves as different?

One of the things they did, for example, was to mint square coins.

This is a typical Almohad dirham,

and by minting coins which had a square format,

which was unusual, coins had been round until that moment,

it was a very simple but not simplistic way of telling everybody,

"A new era has arrived.

"We are something different from what existed before."

How did they enforce their new creed? Were they violent?

What happened to minorities like the Jews and the Christians?

This was a revolutionary movement, and as a revolutionary movement,

they produced revolutionary violence.

They had a charismatic leader who was proclaimed to be infallible,

so they thought that they had the truth

and that the truth, having this Messiah, had to be acknowledged

by everybody, and those who didn't want to accept it,

and if they resisted or made problems,

they were sometimes massacred.

So, what effect did they have on Seville?

Well, they made it its capital, and in order to make it its capital,

they had to change the layout of part of the town.

Where the Cathedral is now, that's where they built their mosque,

which was huge by the standards, even for Almohad standards.

The Almohads built this gorgeous minaret, known as the Giralda.

But it was so tall, that their ageing Moisin, who had to climb it

five times a day to lead the call to prayer, asked for a change,

and they specially designed a ramp inside the tower

so he could ride his donkey all the way to the top.

I applied to do the same, but for some reason, they wouldn't let me.

The Almohads ruled for over a century,

until slowly weakened by their own factional strife.

In 1212, a coalition of the Christian Kings of Castile,

Portugal and Aragon finally defeated them.

They would now swallow the Islamic cities one by one.

In 1248, the King of Castile captured Seville,

installing Christian bells in the minaret of La Giralda.

Spain's landscape was becoming Christian.

By 1250, only one Islamic kingdom remained -

the Emirate of Granada.

And that's my next stop.

Granada, and much of the coast,

was now ruled by the Nasrid family, who emerged after the Almohads -

the last Muslim dynasty.

This bathhouse, or hammam, dates back to the 14th century,

a favourite hang out in Nasrid times.

Muslims were expected to perform ablutions

of ritual purification before prayer.

Though Islam in Nasrid Granada was often lax,

the hammam was also a place of architectural delights,

luxury, sensuality, and beautification.

The Nasrids ruled the last Islamic emirate in Western Europe

with an exquisite if frenzied decadence.

Here in the hammam baths, they continued to enjoy

the traditional Arab luxuries.

Scented in pomegranate and amber,

they enjoyed body washes and body lotions.

Their deodorants were made of great blocks of perfume.

They even used toothpaste.

And here, they ruled on with an ominous and doomed splendour.

The Nasrids were no empire builders.

They were minor Emirs, twisting and turning,

compromising to survive.

Yet they were masters of one thing,

the art of concealing their weakness behind a facade of grandeur.

Spain's supreme example of Muslim architecture,

is built on a rocky outcrop to the north of the city.

Originally a fortress, it was converted

into a Royal Palace in 1333.

'Alhambra' means 'the red'.

The name comes from the red dust that settles on the Citadel.

I'm standing in front of probably the most spectacular Islamic

building in Spain, and one of the most famous buildings in the world.

It's the Alhambra Palace of Granada.

Yet it was built by the Nasrid dynasty, a family of venal,

self-indulgent and feckless, petty tyrants.

The story of the Nasrids, played out within the Alhambra Palace,

is not half as spectacular as the setting they created.

There's something majestic and magnificent about this place -

the very model of a powerful Sultan's palace.

But all is not quite what it seems.

Granada was now at the mercy of the resurgent

Christian Kingdoms to the North.

There's something of a theatrical stage set about this place.

An air of artifice. A flimsiness, a frailty.

This was the Indian summer of Islamic Spain.

How long could it last?

As the last heirs of Islamic resplendence

in al-Andalus, the Nasrids tried to recreate

the glories of their predecessors.

And yet, they built the Alhambra on the cheap.

While they understood beauty, and the interplay of light and shade,

they had to make do with wood and stucco instead of stone and marble.

The Court of Lions reflects a mathematical concept

of perfection, a Muslim golden mean.

Some snobbish 19th century English travellers sneered

that this was just a glorified gazebo.

I'm not so sure.

It's really the jewel in the crown of this amazing complex of palaces.

If you look around at this beautiful work around this

courtyard where the Sultan, the Emir, would hold court,

you can see all the eclectic influences of art

across the Islamic world, from Persia, from Baghdad, from Damascus,

all expressed here in this perfectly exquisite carving that you see.

The lion images are quite unusual,

because imagery was banned as idolatry in most Muslim art.

But these are small enough just to get away with it.

Behind the facade, the last Muslim dynasty in Spain lived in fear.

This is the courtyard of the two doors, because these two doors

tell the story of the paranoia and instability of the Nasrid court.

As you can see, this is now the main entrance.

But in the Islamic world, the right-hand door

was always the main entrance to the court.

Now, the Nasrids were always ready for attack,

and they were a lot more afraid of Muslim factions

or their own family than they were of the Christians.

But if you attacked this door or tried to batter it down,

it would always be in vain, because it's a trompe d'oeil.

There's just a brick wall behind this door.

You could never get in.

This tells you all you need to know about the insecurity,

fear and duplicity in the corridors of the Alhambra Palace.

Amongst this palace of Islamic splendour, hidden from view,

is the symbol of the woman who destroyed it all.

And there you can see it, the crest of Queen Isabella of Castile,

the woman who brought down the last Islamic kingdom in Western Europe.

Isabella and her husband Ferdinand orchestrated

the finale of the Reconquest.

By the 1460s, Spain's three main Christian kingdoms were weary,

divided and embattled, their courts riven by tension

between over-mighty barons and ineffectual monarchs,

their peoples culled by plague.

A final push was needed, yet the Northern Kings were too weak

and feckless to plan a full-scale war.

Isabella, Princess of Castile was 18,

green eyed, auburn hair, small and plump.

But she was intelligent and she was ambitious.

Her brother, Enrique IV, King of Castile,

cut her out of the succession.

Even though he tried to marry her to as many as seven other suitors,

she secretly started to negotiate her own marriage.

Her choice was her cousin Ferdinand, heir to the throne

of the neighbouring kingdom of Aragon.

He was cunning, intelligent and handsome.

Together, they would be a formidable team.

In 1469, the two of them secretly eloped and married.

The marriage changed everything.

Though they kept their own separate kingdoms,

Ferdinand and Isabella's monarchy

was the foundation of what became Spain.

They were united by faith, political acumen and dynastic ambition.

First, they restored power over their turbulent, venal barons.

Then, they turned to Granada.

They captured the Emirate of Granada castle by castle, town by town

and it took them over ten years.

Now, I'm following in their footsteps.

Ferdinand commanded the army, Isabella raised men and money,

helped by the Pope,

who granted them one tenth of all revenues from the Spanish church

for their crusade.

I'm standing at the very spot where, in June 1491,

Queen Isabella set eyes for the first time

on the great prize of her entire career -

the culmination of her personal Christian crusade

to eradicate Islam in Spain.

And there it was before her... Granada.

She stood here, she looked and then she marched down

and paraded her entire army around its walls.

She was tormenting the people of Granada.

The women came out onto the battlements and booed and hissed.

And, finally, the nobility could stand it no longer.

The Islamic knights galloped out and attacked the parade.

But they were fought off.

After 14 years of long war,

marshalled personally by Queen Isabella herself,

at a great cost in blood and treasure,

one by one, the strongholds of Granada had fallen.

And now she was here for the last reckoning.

The final stronghold.

Granada was doomed.

Behind the city wall, as the Christians came closer,

the Nasrids cowered,

plotting against each other, as was their way.

This hidden-away jewel of Granada,

the madrasah, an Islamic school,

was built in 1349 by the greatest of the Nasrid emirs, Yusuf I.

But he was murdered, while praying, soon afterwards by a madman.

And that unfortunate death set a pattern.

The Nasrids were incorrigibly, irredeemably

murderous, dissolute and treacherous.

They had an expression for this.

They called natural deaths "a white death".

And murderous death they called "the red death".

Well, of the first nine emirs of Granada in the Nasrid dynasty,

one was overthrown, one died in an accident

and the rest were all murdered.

The Nasrids were definitely a dynasty of the red death.

Yusuf was succeeded by his teenage son,

who was soon overthrown by his wicked uncle Ismail II.

His vizier and historian, Ibn Khatib,

said that Ismail liked to cavort in female clothing

and was a wicked, perverted and dissolute transvestite.

He was soon overthrown and murdered in the dungeons of the Alhambra.

Just another Nasrid.

Now, within Granada, Muhammad XII,

known to the Spaniards as "Boabdil",

was only on the throne

because his mother forced him to usurp his own father.

He held out against Ferdinand and Isabella for eight months

and then he started to secretly negotiate terms.

On 2nd January 1492,

the banners of Castile and Leon were raised

from the towers of the Alhambra,

to the cry of, "Castile! Castile!" for Ferdinand and Isabella.

On 6th January, the most Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella,

entered the city in formal procession through this gate

to claim Granada for Christendom.

That day, a 46-year-old Genoese sailor

watched the Christian banners flutter on the battlements of Granada.

Cristobal Colon.

We know him as Christopher Columbus.

An eccentric, grizzled maverick,

his dreams now dovetailed perfectly

with the ambitions of Ferdinand and Isabella.

For him, too, this was a blessed day.

The last emir, Boabdil,

turned on this hill, as he marched away

to take up his new estates granted by Ferdinand and Isabella.

He looked over the city.

This was known as "the Moor's last sigh".

Lorca, the great 20th century Spanish poet,

said that when the Moors were driven out of Spain,

their freedom of spirit and their lightness of being

vanished forever.

Their elegant mosques were replaced by garish and ornate churches

filled with bloodstained Christs.

Granada Cathedral captures the blood-spattered triumphalism

of Christian holy war.

Here, St James the Muslim-slayer,

pins an Islamic soldier to the ground by the throat,

like a wounded animal,

before he brings his broadsword crashing down.

Ferdinand and Isabella embraced their mission as Catholic champions

with apocalyptic fervour.

They regarded the capture of the city as a crusading triumph

and Christopher Columbus offered them a way to combine

trade, glory, empire and crusade.

He would sail for the Indies, find gold along the way,

and a route to conquer Jerusalem from the East.

Ferdinand and Isabella were dazzled and they agreed.

They appointed him Admiral of the Ocean Sea,

viceroy of all he captured,

and they issued this decree -

"We despatch Cristobal Colon..."

- Christopher Columbus -

"..with three caravelles, to sail across the ocean sea..."

- that's the Atlantic Ocean -

"..towards the Indies,

"and there to fulfil an enterprise

"that touches on the glory of the Catholic faith."

He sailed and he was away for two years.

The Pope rewarded Ferdinand and Isabella

with the title "the Catholic Monarchs".

Looking inward, though,

they saw their success as fragile,

their sacred rule tainted and weakened dangerously

by alien blood and heretical beliefs.

Ferdinand and Isabella believed that their triumphs

were just part of a divine and apocalyptic master plan.

Before Judgement Day, the hidden one, or the bat,

would swoop down on Spain

and cleanse it of Jews, Muslims and locusts.

Meanwhile, Christopher Columbus would find the gold

and the route to conquer Jerusalem from the East.

In preparation for all this,

Ferdinand and Isabella would cleanse the kingdom.

They would create a pure Christian Jerusalem within Spain itself.

They were considering a solution to a long-standing problem -

a people rooted in Spain since Roman times,

now the enemy within.

On the 31st March 1492,

the monarchs published their decree, which read,

"As the Jews daily continue their evil and their harm,

"the only remedy is to expel them from our kingdoms."

The Jews were given three months to sell everything,

collect their belongings and leave forever.

Or convert to Christianity.

Chillingly, the monarchs chose the 9th of Ab,

the day in the Jewish calendar when the Jews remember

the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem,

as the very date of their deportation.

Out of 300,000 Jews,

about half did convert

and the rest, around 150,000,

departed forever from Spain on this perilous journey.

The 9th of Ab was appropriate

because this was the greatest trauma in Jewish life,

between the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem

and the Holocaust in the 20th century.

I'm visiting one of Spain's few remaining synagogues.

In 1492, hundreds of synagogues were destroyed.

And in all of Spain, only three survive from that time.

And yet, ironically, 20% of Spaniards have Jewish blood today.

As for this synagogue,

it only survived because it was converted into a hospital.

And after 400 years, it was only discovered to be a synagogue

when the plaster fell off the walls to reveal this beautiful decoration.

Spanish Muslims were Isabella's next target.

Her chief adviser was Cardinal Francisco de Cisneros,

the Archbishop of Toledo.

He came down here to Granada and purged Muslim culture.

The bathhouses were closed.

Islamic dress was banned.

And he came here to the madrasah, the old Islamic school,

and cleared out all the Muslim books,

which he claimed encouraged indecency, infidelity and sorcery.

He had them taken outside to the square and systematically burned.

1,000 years of Islamic scholarship went up in smoke.

I'm in the village of Churriana.

It's just outside Granada.

This is where the Muslim and Christian delegates

signed the surrender terms of the city.

And at first, they offered openness of worship and culture.

Isabella was generous,

because she believed the Muslims would convert en masse.

Her bishops descended on Granada

in a triumphant frenzy of missionary optimism.

Some refused to convert.

Others, known as Moriscos, meaning Moorish,

did become Christian.

Their artisans kept up Muslim traditions.

This is a beautiful ceiling,

carved for the Christians by Morisco workmen.

After Muslim unrest,

in 1502 Isabella cancelled her promised toleration.

She banned Islamic practices,

claiming her new Christian subjects

might be false converts.

Trying to convert Muslims to Catholicism -

Archbishop Cisneros told the queen -

was like throwing pearls at swine.

I'm in Seville.

Here, a holy office was set up

to eliminate the bacteria of heresy and impure blood

within the body of Spain.

The Inquisition lacked the scale or efficiency

of a 20th century terror state,

yet it was based on the same public frenzy, suspicion, repression.

In 1480, Ferdinand and Isabella came here to Seville

to establish the Tribunal of the Holy Office.

The Spanish Inquisition.

And they gave them this, the Castle of St George, as their headquarters.

There's not much left of it.

There's just this wall and the dungeons inside.

But this was the working heart, the workhouse,

the gruesome centre of the Inquisition machine.

From here, Inquisitors,

led by the first leader of the Inquisition, Torquemada,

rode out on their mules to search for victims,

assisted by their special faith police force, the Familiars.

Their aim was to enforce a united Catholic Spain.

False converts, known as "the conversos",

were investigated in secret sittings

and tortured to secure forced confessions.

While many Moriscos were hunted down,

the primary targets were the Jews.

The Inquisitors and their pure blood and faith police, the Familiars,

devised increasing ingenious ways to smoke out the crypto-Jews,

whom they called "Marranos", or pigs.

First, they claimed the Jews smelled differently,

because of their secret Judaic cooking practices.

Some say that tapas was created

as a way of surreptitiously testing conversos

to see if they would eat ham or other non-kosher dishes.

But they really did check the conversos hung at least two hams

outside their doors

to show that they were eating non-kosher food.

And as you can see, I think this guy would pass the test!

But more than that, behind the righteousness of the Inquisition,

there was big business and there was greed.

Fortunes were confiscated, great sums were made

by the crown and the Inquisitors,

some of whom were actually prosecuted for extortion.

Faith and avarice dovetailed immaculately.

From 1492 to 1530,

15,000 Spaniards were locked in the torture chambers

of the Inquisition.

2,000 were executed.

90% of those murdered were found guilty of having Jewish blood.

I'm right here in the dungeons of the Inquisition.

And one can almost feel here

the terrible crimes that were committed inside these cold walls.

Tens of thousands of crypto-Jews or conversos,

or people usually totally innocent,

who were denounced for impurity of blood,

were brought here, kept here for years

and tortured to confess, to repent,

or to denounce other traitors.

Most of them, of course,

were simply descendants of Jews from many, many generations ago.

But anyone could be accused of impurity of blood.

Really, the Inquisition was often used

to settle personal scores and rivalries.

Like every Inquisition or terror, it soon started to consume its own.

Professors were denounced by rival professors

for ludicrous crimes, such as studying the Hebrew

instead of the Latin Bible.

A bishop, a minister of the crown,

was denounced and investigated for many years.

As the Inquisition gathered pace,

even devout Christians were accused of heretical tendencies.

One typical victim, a Christian victim of the Inquisition,

was kept in these very dungeons.

Her name was Maria Lopez.

And she was a blind visionary who claimed to be the Virgin Mary.

She was accused of having sex with her jailors.

But she certainly asked them to whip her naked,

while she was held in these cells.

In the end, she was found guilty.

She was taken out to be burned,

but repented and, as a result,

before the flames were lit,

she was given the great honour of being garrotted.

Then she was burnt.

Such was the mercy of the Inquisition.

I'm off to Cordoba now

to find out more about the Jewish victims of the Inquisition.

While most conversos gave up their Jewish faith

and became devout Catholics,

some secretly kept their Judaism alive

at great personal cost.

This is the Casa de Sefarad in Cordoba,

the House of the Spanish or Sephardic Jews.

These Jewish prayer books show how secret Jews

practised their faith in private.

They have Latin on the outside, Hebrew on the inside.

In Spain, the distant past still has the power

to spring terrible surprises.

As a historian of Sephardic Jewish descent,

I thought I knew everything about my own family's story.

Turns out I was wrong.

Alex Tellez is one of the research team here,

who have looked back 12 generations into my family.

I didn't know that we came from Spain.

Nor that we served the Spanish kings in Mexico.

Alex, you've been doing some research into my family, I understand.

Show me what you've found. I'm fascinated.

This is part of a two-volume collection

of volumes belonging to the national files of Mexico.

Because they went to Mexico.

What? Show me! I've never heard that before.

They were the governors of an area of Mexico, the northern part.

So wait a second, so the Carvajals...

-I'm descended from this family, the Carvajals.

-Carvajals, yes.

They pretended to convert, or they did convert, to Christianity.

They pretended to convert.

They convert officially and they practised Christianity officially.

But at home, secretly, they practised Judaism.

You were fake Christians.

I don't mind being descended from fake Christians at all.

-I'm proud they kept it going.

-No, of course. It's a reason to be proud.

So they were secret Jewish governors of these colonies.

When you said you had something about my family,

I expected some sort of very vague, distant thing that, you know...

But this is... This is actually...

This is the direct descent of the family,

from these people I've never heard of.

-A straight branch, actually.

-Yeah.

So you've got the brother, Luis...

Uh-huh.

..who's pretty young, actually. He's about 30.

And you've got Lenora de Andrade, who is his sister.

Exactly. Luis de Carvajal got in a fight

with one of the important figures of the city.

And this man denounced the family to the Inquisition.

-Oh, my gosh.

-Because of this.

In this document,

which is the auto-da-fe document,

the judgement of the trial, he was accused of being a traitor

and for being, as well, a heretic.

Is this his death sentence?

Exactly. The death sentence.

They are hunted down by the Inquisition

and they're basically wiped out

by the Inquisition.

I mean, the brother... First of all, Luis and Leonora are killed

and burnt to death.

-Almost the same time.

-Almost the same time.

Maybe even in the same auto-da-fe,

the same burning in the square of Mexico City.

I mean, that's heartbreaking enough to die brother and sister.

In the case of Leonora de Andrade,

Leonora, she was proud of being what she was,

of practising Judaism at home, secretly.

At the moment of the trial,

she recited a poem she wrote,

in which she asked for the help of the Messiah, the King of the Jews.

Mm... Do you have that somewhere?

Yes, I've got some verses of the poem in Spanish.

I think this is the saddest cut of all.

Yes, she is actually asking for a sweet death,

for a sweet end, to God.

So this girl, in her 20s,

who, literally, you know, minutes or hours later

is going to be burned naked to death

in the square of Mexico City, probably,

is asking for a sweet...

for an easy death in the flames.

Exactly. That's the point of this poem.

Just unbelievable.

Amazing.

I'm usually dubious of the lachrymose fashion

for televised family revelations from history.

Yet this has surprised and moved me.

My direct ancestors were secret Jews,

royal civil servants in colonial Mexico,

hoping to avoid the Spanish Inquisition.

They were betrayed and sent to their deaths.

We know for sure one child escaped -

Joseph Leon, son of Leonora.

Only by fleeing to Tuscany

and changing his name there to Montefiore,

did the family find safety.

I'm in Granada, where Ferdinand and Isabella are buried

in the royal chapel here at the cathedral.

Their actions in war and in peace changed Spain forever.

Yet when Isabella died in 1504, there was unfinished business.

For all her success, her family was unlucky.

Her sons died young

and her elder surviving daughter was no Isabella.

HUSHED TONE: They've let me into the vault of Ferdinand and Isabella,

where they're actually buried.

In many ways, this is the secret heart, not just of Granada,

but of Spain itself.

And it's usually closed to the public.

But here lie the two great Catholic monarchs.

The most successful king and queen of their era.

But at what a cost.

And when they died, they laid buried here.

Over there you can see their crown and their sceptre and Christ,

which sums up their rule.

They were succeeded by their daughter, Juana,

who lies over there.

She was married to Philip the Handsome,

the Habsburg Duke of Burgundy.

When he died - and his body lies over there -

she refused to bury him.

She carried his body round and round Spain for months and years

as he rotted, bloated and putrefied.

They realised, of course, that she was mad.

She's known to history as Juana la Loca - Juana the Mad.

In 1516, Juana the Mad was deposed in favour of her son Charles.

He was the dutiful and shrewd heir to vast Hapsburg lands...

..Archduke of Austria, King of Spain and soon Holy Roman Emperor, too.

Charles V came to Spain

to claim his new kingdom

and win over his dubious subjects.

In March 1526,

he stayed for months here at the Alhambra with his new young wife.

It was his honeymoon.

Most royal marriages are miserable, but Charles got lucky.

He fell passionately in love with his bride,

Princess Isabella of Portugal,

who was beautiful and intelligent.

They were married in Seville,

but they came here to Granada for their honeymoon.

They were so happy

that Charles built this extraordinary palace, square on the outside,

but with this surprising circular courtyard in the middle.

But Charles went away to war.

Isabella died tragically young.

And Charles never came back.

Charles' sprawling territories

meant never-ending wars from one end of Europe to the other.

And there was more - a greater empire to come.

Columbus never reached Jerusalem,

yet he found the Indies.

It took a generation of adventurers, blessed by Charles V,

to turn a geographical discovery into a world empire.

Those ferocious Spanish conquistadors, Cortes and Pizarro,

were conquering new territories - Mexico and Peru - in the Americas.

And they sent back enough gold to fund Spain's Catholic mission

and to make Spain the dominant military power in Europe

for almost a century.

Their ambitions were boundless.

Their resources seemed endless.

They were doing God's work.

Who could stop them?

Next time...

Spain at its zenith.

Philip II, a colossus.

A new capital, Madrid, flourishes.

Napoleon invades.

And, in a bloody civil war,

Hitler and Stalin duel for Spain,

leaving a cruel dictatorship.

I wouldn't have been surprised

if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

had clattered into the hall.

If this story has inspired you

and you'd like to find out more,

go to the address given on-screen

and follow the links to the Open University.